Meet the Drill Sergeant, your new virtual shop teacher.
Thanks to the nation-wide death of shop class, an entire generation of kids is growing up without knowing the proper way to use a band saw (without someone standing behind it), or how to hold a power drill (not by the cord or the spinning bit).
That's something Eldon Schoop, a PhD candidate in computer sciences at U.C. Berkeley, thinks will ultimately prove to be a disadvantage to millions of would-be makers when they want to evolve past 3D printers to create custom objects of increasing complexity. Back in the day, kids learned to use tools thanks to hands-on time with their seven-fingered shop teacher. How do you teach people those same lessons in the 21st century?
Along with his partner on the project, Michelle Nguyen, Schoop's answer to this question is the Drill Sergeant, a robotic tutoring platform that augments a set of power tools to teach people how to use them safely . . . while also making them more fully functional. Their vision is to enable anyone to walk into this "smart workshop," regardless of skill level, and walk out with a beautiful finished product—all without leaving any fingers behind.
That's a tall order, admits Schoop. "Many skilled craftspeople start as apprentices, where they receive instruction, coaching, and feedback from a master," he says. The Drill Sergeant system was borne out of a desire to emulate this hands-on tutelage, by embedding coaching functionality—the eponymous Drill Sergeant—into the tools themselves, creating a smart drill, miter saw, and CNC router.
The drill is an off-the-shelf model augmented by sensors that can detect its position, whether or not the chuck is spinning, and when a user's finger is on the trigger. A pico projector projects instructions on how to properly bore a hole right onto the surface that is being drilled, while also giving continuous feedback on whether or not a user is drilling straight thanks to the included sensors. It'll even warn you when you've reached the correct depth, and help you find the right-sized screw for the hole by projecting a perspective- and distance-corrected image underneath it. ("If you have a bucket of random screws in your garage like I do, I guarantee you'll appreciate this last [feature]," says Schoop.)
Similar to the drill, the miter saw is augmented with sensors that detect its bevel angle, how fast a user is pulling it into the material, and the length of the piece being cut, while a connected tablet shows you step-by-step instructions. If you slip making a cut—say, making it slightly larger than intended—the saw will adjust measurements of other pieces being cut, so they assemble together correctly. Finally, there's a smart CNC router with a camera in its bit and a small tablet on top displaying a perspective-corrected feed of the object you're cutting. "You can use it to place the cutting path for your project right onto the workpiece, eliminating tons of setup time," Schoop says.
Although none of these Drill Sergeant-enabled smart tools will make up for being a spatially challenged, butterfingered dummy like yours truly, Schoop says that the next-generation of makers need a toolbox that's updated for the 21st century. "Over the next few years, I believe there is going to be a revolution in how we make things," says Schoop. Although it's a student project for now, Schoop and Huang say they're working hard with unnamed partners to make the Drill Sergeant a retail product. "The future is very bright, and I'm excited to see how Drill Sergeant can play its part."
In certain situations, a glance or a stare can say more than words. What if our clothing responded to those subtle social interactions?
We often think of our clothing as a second skin, but fabric doesn't react like skin does. Skin breathes. It shivers. It contracts. It's constantly in motion.
Yet the differences between clothing and skin are much smaller when it comes to Caress of the Gaze, a unique, 3D printed garment from Iranian-American designer Behnaz Farahi that bristles under the gaze of the person looking at it. In appearance, it looks like a porcupine-quilled, exposed-midriff smock, or maybe a futuristic kind of Rorschach shawl. It was designed by Farahi last year as part of her residency at Autodesk's Pier 9.
"It was inspired by looking at the behavior and properties of skin," Farahi says. "The idea was to create an artificial skin inspired by nature, with enhanced functionality, which could function as an extension of our actual skin, while providing novel forms of interaction between our body and the surrounding environment."
The garment works thanks to an embedded facial tracking algorithm, which can detect the gender, age, and gaze orientation of the person looking at the shawl. Depending on who is looking at it, and how, an interconnected mesh of Shape Memory Alloy (a material which "remembers" its original shape when transformed by actuators) causes the garment to silently and organically ripple, just like a real skin response mechanisms. For example, the shawl might shyly shrink under a judgmental gaze, or peacock itself in front of an appreciative look.
Farahi chose an onlooker's gaze as the mechanism that triggered the garment's interactivity to highlight the outsized role it plays in our social lives. A look can communicate respect, attraction, contempt, anger, affection, humor, and more. Depending on which look we're on the receiving end of, our skin reacts as well, by blushing, or getting goosebumps, or heating up. Of course, in our every day lives, our clothing obscures a lot of the ways our skin reacts to these social interactions. The Caress of the Gaze, though, calls attention to these reactions.
"To me, the future of fashion lies in the promise of being dynamic and interactive with the wearer," says Farahi. "Wearable technologies are changing our notion of what our bodies can do, allowing them to be augmented, enhanced, and expanded." Because of this, the designer argues, fashion will increasingly become an interface between our bodies and our surrounding environments, eventually facilitating new ways of communicating with one another.
In addition to exploring interactivity in fashion, though, Farahi created the piece to show how 3D printing is enabling new types of garments. She says that without 3D printers, the form and morphology of the shawl, and the life-like mesh of moving quills, would have been impossible. It involves too many distinct moving parts to be practical. "I think advanced 3D printing will enable us to move [in fashion] beyond just imitating forms already present in nature," she says, "to having a deeper understanding of their behaviors."
The U.S. military is looking for better ways to keep its soldiers safe during chemical and biological attacks.
In the 21st century, soldiers need more than a good set of field armor to do their jobs. They also need versatile chemical-biological suits, or chembio suits. Resembling camouflage-covered versions of Hollywood hazmat suits, real-life chembio suits tend to be bulky, uncomfortable, and awkward to move around in.
That's a small price to say for not having your lungs liquefy from an unknown chemical agent, many would say, but the U.S. Military thinks it can do better. To that end, the Chemical and Biological Defense division within the Department of Defense is launching a contest with a $250,000 prize, looking for ideas on how to improve the chembio suit from fashion designers, material scientists, researchers, and students.
According to the contest's official website, "the current chemical biological suit's burden, weight, and bulkiness restrict the warfighter's agility, range of motion, and maneuverability necessary to conduct their duties." What the military wants to see are innovative ideas and designs that will allow soldiers to move more quickly and naturally, "allowing the warfighter to complete all relevant tasks in a fast and comfortable manner," without getting tired from putting the ensemble on.
Another design problem the Department of Defense wants to solve is heat management. Current suits are extremely unpleasant to wear, because they're too warm and don't have good ventilation. In addition, the military is putting out a special call for designs that improve the way suit components fit together, such as a face mask helmet, or the way a glove or boot joins at the sleeve. "The ultimate goal is to relieve any burdens and hazards to the warfighter and improve operational capabilities in combating chemical and biological wartime threats," the Chembio Challenge states. Those who submit a winning idea have the opportunity to cash in big, with awards ranging from $5,000 all the way to $150,000.
The judges for the contest come from a wide range of disciplines, hinting at its ambitions. Along with two officials from the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense division, there are three additional judges from outside the government: Matthew Trexler, director of technology validation at Under Armour; Mark Sunderland, a professor of textile engineering at Philadelphia University and chief executive officer of Boathouse, and David Strum, president of Velocity Systems, a military body armor company. It's a meeting of the minds of the tech, fashion, and engineering worlds, which is something the Department of Defense and MIT have been doing a lot of lately, thanks to a recent $317 million partnership.
Check out that frog and bird party that's going to hit Ecuador in 2116.
As climate change heats our world up, it will have devastating effects on the American landscape. But one of the biggest changes may go unnoticed by most humans, as thousands of species are prodded by warming temperatures and changing weather patterns into large-scale migrations—as visualized by Migrations in Motion.
Created by researchers from the University of Washington and the Nature Conservancy, Migrations in Motion models the migration paths of 2,954 different North and South American species using projected climate change patterns over the next 100 years. The model—which is based on electronic circuit theory, and predicts patterns of connectivity across landscapes—shows that through vast areas of the Western Hemisphere (especially the Amazon Basin, southeastern United States, and southeastern Brazil), animals will need to travel much farther to reach their ideal climates over the next century.
The visualization itself is undeniably pretty, as candy-colored swirls representing birds, mammals, and amphibians pulse like gulf streams across the skin of the planet. There are also some interesting hotspots: check out the bird and frog party that's going to be happening in Ecuador come 2116!
But the ultimate point of this visualization isn't to be another climate change curiosity, but to bring attention to the fact that, right now, a lot of the migration corridors along which animals will try to travel aren't open. They're fractured by walls, highways, fences, overpasses, and other human constructions, which will actually prevent animals from migrating the way they should. This, in turn, could lead to mass die-offs, and even extinctions.
What's the solution? In short, open those corridors up. The Nature Conservancy recommends that conservationists and land managers work to re-build or maintain connectivity between species' current habitats and their likely future ones. Yet Migrations in Motion visualization doesn't provide detail on where those problem spots are, and according to the Nature Conservancy's senior landscape ecologist Brad McRae, it might be impossible to know. "Conservationists can't predict where every species needs to move and where every barrier is that might stand in their way," he tells Nature. The only thing we can do is work to keep natural patches of land connected as a general rule of thumb.
The latest issue of Elsie is fantastic, but still raises questions about whether sites like Fiverr liberate or exploit creatives.
Whatever you think of the gig economy—a way to exploit people who don't know what their talents are worth, or a way to let them monetize their true passions—you've got to admit there's a lot of talent and creativity locked up in it. That's exactly what Les Jones, a U.K.-based creative director and photographer, wanted to highlight. So he created a magazine commissioned entirely from gigs posted to Fiverr, the popular freelancer marketplace. One year and $1,086 dollars later, it's now a reality. And honest to god, it rules.
The Fiverr issue of Jones's one-man magazine, Elsie is 55 pages long and contains almost 70 contributions from Fiverr freelancers, most of whom provided their services for just $5. To give you a sense of how cheap that is, consider that many magazines pay $1 to $2 a word, or more. So a 1,000-word article at a traditional magazine would cost more than the entire issue of Elsie.
To compile the magazine, Jones browsed Fiverr, and paid freelancers on the network whatever they were asking for their services, ranging from "I will create your message in alphabet spaghetti" to "I will send you a hipster postcard from N.Y.C." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the finished issue is incredibly diverse, with gigs commissioned from 29 different countries.
From South Africa, one Fiverr freelancer provided a speech on why print isn't dead, while another contributed a unique South African photo package of daily life in Johannesburg. A Sri Lankan Fiverr-er(?) provided Jones a mostly accurate palm reading; an artist from Spain made him a Rorschach-style inkblot. In Japan, a woman sent Jones 15 paper boxes made by her 99-year-old grandmother, who folded them by hand to keep her fingers limber. A Pakistani inventor named Faisal Shahzhad sold Jones 10 new product ideas, ranging from a robotic water cooler to an anti-theft device for third-world livestock.
The most Jones ever spent was $50 for a pair of mandalas illustrated by a product design consultant in India. Other contributions include old Hot Wheels cars, a smattering of portraits (including the one, created by an Indonesian artist, which graces the issue's cover), a few recipes, an informative Q&A about pygmy hedgehogs, and Jones's "by far" favorite, an extra chunky and curly crocheted beard sent by a Minnesotan knitter.
According to Jones, the Fiverr issue of Elsie was a follow-up to his previous issue, in which he took a photograph of a London street sign covered in underground graffiti and creative stickers, then tracked down as many of the people on it as he could. The resulting journey ultimately took him all over Europe and America. "After that, I gave myself a self-imposed brief that I would try to make as eclectic a magazine as [I could for] issue three, without leaving my house." He decided to try Fiverr after a friend of his used the site to design her wedding invitations. "The first gig I commissioned on Fiverr was from a girl in Japan," Jones remembers. "A few weeks later, I got an envelope of Japanese sweets and candies in the mail. As soon as that happened, I knew this was going to be great."
And it is great. The resulting magazine is so wonderful, in fact, it's probably the best PR Fiverr—a site that is much criticized among design communities who believe it is devaluing the work of creatives—could hope for. And Fiverr knows it. After being contacted by Jones about his experiment, Fiverr volunteered to sponsor the latest issue of Elsie. "They didn't have, or want to have, any say in the content of the magazine," says Jones, who argues that Elsie remains a one-man creative project. Even so, Fiverr's sponsorship will pay for the entire print run of Elsie's latest issue. They are also helping promote the issue, both with the press and helping to taking Jones on the road later this year with some Elsie-themed events.
So Fiverr knows the Fiverr issue of Elsie is good press. Even so, there's something bittersweet about flipping through the magazine. It's filled with just so many creative people, many of whom (it could be argued) are grotesquely undervaluing their talent. Jones says he understands that perception. "Services like Fiverr definitely raise some ethical questions," he says, but he also thinks that "a lot of the stuff that happens in the creative industry is overpriced."
Besides, while $5 might by chump change for a creative working in Brooklyn, there are parts of the world—countries where Jones commissioned gigs from, like India, Sri Lanka, or Mongolia—where $5 can go pretty far. Jones was born in London and studied to be a creative, which gave him a "privileged route to success," he says, that most artistic people around the world don't have. For them, sites like Fiverr give them a way to earn money doing what they love in a way that might otherwise be impossible for them.
There are valid points to be made on both sides of the argument about whether the gig economy is exploiting or liberating an entire generation of people around the world. (It's probably doing both.) But one thing that can't be argued with is that thanks to the gig economy, Elsie's Fiverr issue might be one of the most delightful and uncynical magazines to come to press in recent memory. You can order a copy here.
Now on Kickstarter, these small Bluetooth beacons contextualize how your smartphone behaves based on your location.
I think we can all generally agree push notifications are a design kludge—and an ugly one at at that. They come in a relentless stream of angrily buzzing digital distractions, insisting upon our attention no matter what we're doing, or how important they are. And it's depressing that while contextis the new watchword in mobile UI design, companies like Google and Apple still haven't fully applied that to their push notification systems.
It makes perfect sense that you might want to set contextual rules for how you get contacted on your phone: no calls when you're in the bathroom, or a daily run-down of your calendar when you sit down in front of your desk in the morning. But your smartphone doesn't really have the hardware to determine where you are with that sort of accuracy. GPS just doesn't have the granularity to determine whether or not you're in your bedroom or your home office, which is why companies like Apple use supplementary hardware called iBeacons to provide customers contextual information throughout their stores. Google has a similar project, called Nearby, that pings users in public places like museums and stores.
Dot is a set of beacon-like devices for your home and other personal spaces that allow you to contextualize your push notifications. A Dot is essentially a Bluetooth beacon that you stick on any surface. As your smartphone gets closer, it can detect the exact distance based upon signal strength, and send a push notification when you get within a certain distance. What's cool about Dot is that you can program that notification to contain anything, through an app inspired by popular internet recipe-making platform IFTTT (an acronym for "If This, Then That"). A Dot can just as easily be programmed to remind your roommate to take out the trash as it can turn on the smart lights to your bedroom when you walk in the room.
Outside of contextual notifications, and the ability to open apps and control objects in your smart home based on proximity, each Dot also comes with an embedded color-changing LED, which can provide useful information. For instance, if you live with a roommate who's always hiding in his room, a Dot on the jamb of his door could tell you when he's home or not. A blinking Dot when you arrive home could tell you if you have any messages; one at your work desk could tell you you have some emails from your boss. Another example cited by the creators: a Dot in your car could automatically open Waze or Google Maps to route you on the fastest way to work.
Now available for preorder on Kickstarter, an individual Dot is quite reasonably priced at around $20 each, and you get a discount when you order three or more. If push notifications are driving you insane, this seems like a cheap way to give them genuine smarts. It's an interesting product, if only because it's the first time we've really seen how contextual notifications can be useful to consumers—not retail stores trying to sell us stuff.
The Ammunition-backed microlending startup Branch is a great study in how to design user experiences for the developing world.
About a year ago, Matt Rolandson, partner at the design firm Ammunition was driving his car through San Francisco on his way to work when he saw Matt Flannery, cofounder of the microlending nonprofit Kiva.org, striding by with seeming excitement. Rolandson rolled down his window and asked where Flannery was off to. "I'm off to start a bank in Kenya!" Flannery said. Without hearing anything else, Rolandson told Flannery to stop by the offices when he had a chance, to see if there was anything Ammunition could do to help.
In the end, Ammunition did more than help Flannery's new for-profit microlending business, Branch. They incubated it and became its first investors.
Today, Branch has 100,000 users in Kenya and Tanzania (where credit cards are not the norm), and they use the app to borrow small amounts, usually between $30 and $40. The loans are handed out based upon a machine-learning algorithm that scans users' data (with their permission), then approves or denies loans based upon what it finds. For example, Branch might scan a borrower's history and extrapolate that they can pay back a loan based on a high volume of calls versus text messages. When a loan is approved, the app works like a credit card, using Tanzania and Kenya's popular mobile wallet service, M-Pesa.
Though Branch may be designed with customers in Kenya and Tanzania in mind, the design principles behind the app can be applied to any developing country where mobile phone technology hasn't caught up to that of the first world. With the new version of the app released this month, Rolandson and Flannery sat down with us to talk about what lessons can be gleaned by other developers looking to design a new app product for the developing world.
In the United States and other developed countries, bandwidth is not that much of a design concern, thanks to the ubiquity of fast fiber, Wi-Fi, and LTE. Consequently, even simple apps usually clock in anywhere from 50 MB to 100 MB or more, including Facebook Messenger, Inbox by Google, Skype, and Twitter. We don't even think of these apps as bloated, but to someone in Tanzania or Kenya, they are. "These are countries where people usually pay for every megabyte they download," Flannery says. "So if you want people to use their app, it has to be as small as possible."
In Branch's case, Ammunition was able to reduce the size of the Android app down to just 2.7 MB, by keeping flashy graphics and custom animations to a minimum, and relying heavily on fonts that already ship on your phone.
While most people's cell plans in Tanzania and Kenya are quite expensive, the phones themselves are cheap. How cheap? "Really cheap," says Flannery. "Like, cheap Chinese Android phones that cost less than $50." That means they have small processors, little memory, and tiny screens. And forget about iPhones. "The only people who have iPhones are government officials, who don't need microloans."
So when it came to designing the Branch app, Ammunition took pains to make it as efficient on slow Android phones as possible, while also taking into account the fact that most people would be using it on sub-four-inch displays. System-choking animations are kept to a minimum, and while the graphic design is slick, it's visually simple. It also takes pains to keep the amount of text and actions per screen to the barest minimum—typically only one action per screen.
"For our user base, Branch is probably the third app they've ever used, the first two being Whatsapp and Facebook, which usually come pre-installed on their phones," Flannery says. "Maybe if you're lucky, someone's used Twitter, too."
What that means is that general literacy of mobile UIs in Tanzania and Kenya is still at the level of the average American when Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone in 2007: nonexistent. That's why Ammunition took a step-by-step, one-action-per-screen approach to the majority of Branch's UI. It's a straight arrow, guiding users who may have never used a more complicated app through the process of signing up for their first loan.
Notice anything about the list of apps above? Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter—they're all, in essence, chat apps. Because of the aforementioned pay-per-megabyte nature of African mobile carriers, the most popular apps are all about messaging and socializing: text, after all, is cheap in data terms.
Branch also has a chatting component through a "Get Answers" option which gives new users a familiar touchstone to get their head around a very different kind of app compared with the ones they're used to. But chatting solves an even more important secondary issue for Branch: trust.
"When people in these countries hear about Branch, their first thought is, this has to be scam, it's too good to be true," says Rolandson. The chat interface allows Branch users, skeptical of a service the likes of which we take for granted, to talk to a human and assure themselves it is real. Flannery says that they often get incredulous new users asking them to "prove" Branch is real. Chatting to a human helps them do that. "Chat's the real secret to our success," says Flannery.
Ultimately, what Rolandson and Flannery both think has been key to their success is delivering a modern, high-end looking app, to a part of the world that generally doesn't see many of them. "Really, all we're doing is bringing U.S. best practices to a market that isn't there yet," Rolandson explains. The slick designs that work in America can still be effective in other parts of the world, as long as you're not naive about the on-the-ground realities of the developing world. Meet users where they are, and you've won half the battle.
This beacon system makes that overstuffed host binder a thing of the past.
Every Airbnb is different. Some have Wi-Fi passwords like 1234, others have 16-digit WEP passwords that read like a Cylon's genetic code. Some are okay with you grabbing a beer from the fridge, others will one-star you if you so much as steal a dab of the host's toothpaste.
For all its success on the booking side of things, Airbnb has no standardized user interface to deal with this. It's up to the host to communicate house rules, whether through as a thick folder of print-outs or a steady stream of passive-aggressive comments.
Created by Kristian Knobloch, a recent graduate from the Royal College of Art, Ping is a system that makes it easier for Airbnb hosts to convey useful rules to a guest. It's basically a series of wireless-enabled touchpoints that a host can spread through their home to distribute useful information in a contextual way. When a guest taps his smartphone against a Ping beacon, it automatically opens a webpage, providing info about the room he's standing in.
For example, when you enter an Airbnb's home for the first time, the Ping beacon next to the door might pop up a video of the host, welcoming you to her apartment and telling you where you'll find your room. A beacon near the router might give your smartphone the Wi-Fi password; in the bathroom, instructions on where to find fresh towels; or in the kitchen, how to use the coffee machine. You can basically convey anything in a Ping, from basic house rules to recommendations for places to go in the neighborhood. There are even ways to set up a Ping to automatically call a host in case of a problem, just by tapping your smartphone against the proper beacon.
According to Knoblach, the physical design of the Ping beacons was made not only to fit in with Airbnb's branding scheme, but also to allow the beacons to stand out in every room (the dark salmon color) while also looking more like a homeware than a technical product, thanks to wood grain construction. Right now, they run off of NFC chips, which makes Ping compatible with Android and Samsung phones, but not iPhones; the creator says a Bluetooth version compatible with Apple devices will be coming soon.
While it's not a retail product yet, Knoblach is currently working on bringing Ping to market; Airbnb hosts can even sign up for the forthcoming beta here. And why not? It's such a great idea, it's a wonder that Airbnb hasn't just started shipping something like this itself: not only are these a cheap and useful way to standardize the way hosts communicate with their guests, they're a fantastic way of reinforcing the Airbnb brand within other people's homes.
The Proximity Button warns caregivers when their patients or loved ones have wandered outside of a designated safe area.
Some 44 million people suffering from dementia worldwide. Three out of five people with Alzheimer's and other conditions linked to dementia are prone to wandering away from their caregiver; if they aren't found within 24 hours, up to half suffer serious injury, or even death.
Proximity Button, a small wearable button designed by the U.K.'s Mettle Studios for Proximity Care, was created for people living with dementia (and their caregivers). This simple wearable does only one thing: it warns caregivers when a person with dementia wanders out of a designated safe zone.
To activate the Proximity Button, a caregiver just sets up a perimeter of battery-operated Bluetooth beacons—which are all the rage right now— around a safe area. Then he or she puts the Proximity Button on a patient's shirt collar. Since this also includes a Bluetooth radio, the button stays in constant contact with the beacons surrounding it; the second it loses contact, it assumes them wearer has wandered off, and sends an urgent alert to the caregivers' phone, letting them know to check on their patient. Caregivers can even track more than one person at a time using the app, useful for hospitals and other institutions which might have to look after multiple patients at once.
The design of the Proximity Button is clean and efficient, using a simple hooking mechanism to loop around the collar, while a magnet secures it in place. In appearance, it almost looks like a clothing store's anti-theft tag. "We didn't want anything to look too explicitly medical, we wanted it to be a bit more towards the agnostic tech end," Mettle Studio creative director Alex Bone told Designweek. "That's why it's more plain, and we wanted to have all the places and weight on the inside, to make it less noticeable."
Although the Proximity Button is primarily aimed at people suffering from dementia, it could also benefit people with autism and their caregivers. As Proximity Care notes, almost half of all autistic children tend to wander, and the consequences can be frightful. "Terrifyingly, from 2009-2011, accidental drowning accounted for 91% of U.S. deaths reported in children [with an autistic disorder] aged 14 and younger due to wandering." And 77% of those children were being watched by their parents when they died.
Most wearables have a reputation for being a little frivolous, but with statistics like these, it's hard to argue that with the Proximity Button. This wearable cold literally save lives. The Proximity Button and its beacon system will be available for purchase in November this year, at a still unknown price. You can sign up to be alerted when they go on sale here.
Dog parks? Better than human parks. Doggy bags? Better than dumping your leftovers in the trash. Dogsledding? Superior to tobogganing, by far. Yes, the old adage is true. Doing it doggy style makes everything better—even starchy old art exhibits, as inventor Dominic Wilcox proves. His latest whimsical design project is the world's first art exhibition for dogs.
A refreshing analog to the chin-stroking, thumb-framing stuffiness of a homo sapien art show, the show featured eight distinct works, each designed mostly for the enjoyment of attending pups.
Three of the works in the exhibitions were by Wilcox himself. The first, Cruising Canines, put dogs inside a plywood open car window simulator, complete with the effect of open air rushing by, provided by a nearby fan filled with smelly old shoes and cuts of steak. Next, there was Dinnertime Dreams, a 10-foot-wide dog bowl filled with hundreds of light brown playballs, mimicking giant kibble. Then there was Watery Wonder, a collection of stainless steel dishes with leaping spurts of water dancing between them.
Outside of what Wilcox has designed for the show, there were five other works on display. Artist Nick White presented Catch, a multimedia exhibit of a frisbee bouncing back and forth on a screen mounted at roughly dog height. From Joanne Hummel-Newell, there is Post, an interpretation of a dog's excitement when a new letter drops through the mailbox. There were also three other paintings for dogs, by artists Robert Nicol, Michelle Thompson, and Clare Mallison. All of these works were uniquely produced in a gray, yellow, and blue palette, which is the color spectrum seen by most dogs, thanks to the fact that they only have two different color sensitive cone cell types in their retina.
Wilcox's exhibition was sponsored by More Than, a U.K. insurance company that is trying to promote its pet insurance offerings. (And everyone should have pet insurance). Wilcox, a professional weirdo as well as dog lover, has his own reasons for mounting the exhibit, though.
"Contemporary art has long been an important source of inspiration and fascination for humans, but never before has it been created with a view to drawing the same kind of emotions out of animals instead," Wilcox said in a statement. "While it's certainly one of the more interesting challenges I've faced in my career, it feels great to have created such a truly unique collection of interactive artworks for a completely new audience."
Like binoculars for hearing or a strap-on nose stylus for your iPhone, Wilcox's works often feel like weird improv prompts: "Okay, okay! For your next sketch, you're an art exhibition . . . for dogs!" That's not a coincidence. In the past, Wilcox has said that he's so desperate for inspiration, he'll latch onto any idea, no matter how mad. In this case, though, I think he may have come up with his most sane idea yet. After all: What museum or gallery wouldn't be improved by the presence of dozens of scampering pups?
Sadly, the time to see the World's Art Exhibition for Dogs is already behind us: it was on display on August 19-20 in London. Dewclaws crossed that it eventually has a world tour.
If we're expecting new iPhones and a new Apple Watch, why are we already yawning?
After sending out an event invite featuring a pretty bokeh photo of devices in a darkroom, Apple is expected to announce its latest products next week—including updates to the iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple Watch, and more.
Usually, Apple's autumn events are like high-tech magic shows: We all gather around as Tim Cook and Co. stride on stage, say alakazam, and pull a steady succession of new devices out of their hats. This year, though? If the rumor mill is to be believed, Apple may have significantly fewer tricks.
Here's a breakdown of what we're expecting from Apple next Tuesday. Spoiler alert: We may see a lot of incremental updates—along with one that could significantly shift Apple's design needle.
Due to the amount of time it takes for an iPhone to ramp up to full production, iPhone 7 parts have been leaking out since March, so we've got a pretty good idea of what's in store, design-wise: not much.
Otherwise, everything is expected to be pretty much the same—just slightly upgraded. It's possible you'll even be able to use your existing case.
Like Intel's CPUs, iPhones have historically held to a fairly predictable tick-tock cycle. The tick is a major hardware redesign, with the "tock," a minor spec bump of the same design, coming the following year. But again like Intel's CPU pipeline, it appears that the evolution of the iPhone is slowing down to a tick-tock-tock cycle. Rumors right now peg the iPhone 8 coming in 2017, not 2016. Being the 10th anniversary iPhone and first major redesign since the iPhone 6, it's suggested that the iPhone 8 will finally get rid of its iconic home button in favor of an edge-to-edge screen.
The great Cambrian period of rapid-fire smartphone evolution has ended. We've already seen the mass extinction event: Apple and Samsung have wiped out pretty much all of their Western smartphone competitors over the last decade, although the likes of Xiaomi, Oppo, and Hauwei are still challenging them in China. In addition, carriers are phasing out handset subsidies, slowing the rate at which people upgrade their phones. Couple that with the fact that Apple's already reached the point of diminishing returns on making the iPhone any thinner or lighter, and what it all boils down to is there's just not that much room for sizable industrial design improvements anymore.
Which is not to say that the iPhone 7's slightly updated design won't have ramifications. Losing the 3.5 mm jack is a wildly controversial move on Apple's part, causing even Apple pundits to scratch their heads. That said, it'll likely open up a new, billion-dollar industry of Lightning-equipped headphones and headphone adapters—jump-started by Apple's own new Lightning-equipped Earpods and its wireless AirPod headphones, which are also expected to debut next week.
As for the changed home button? If that rumor holds true, Apple will have successfully addressed one of the most common reasons iPhones break: Their sole moving part stopped working. It also paves the way for next year's iPhone, which is rumored to make the iconic home button virtual.
It's been four years since Apple revamped the MacBook Pro's design, so it's well past the point of needing an update—which makes it the one product that could see a major design overhaul next week. Bloombergreports that next week's event will also give us our first look at the next-gen MacBook Pro laptop.
Predictably, Apple seems to be planning on using this refresh to shave some millimeters and milligrams off of the device, making it lighter and svelter. Apple's fetish for making its devices thinner well past the point of good sense is justifiably mocked—any environmental benefits of making a gadget that weighs less is counterbalanced by the sacrifice of upgradeability—but in the MacBook Pro's case, a pared-down design overhaul makes sense. Right now, it's a bit of a clunker, at least compared to the current Retina MacBook, or even the MacBook Air, which has gone without an industrial design overhaul for an astonishing six years.
But a thinner, lighter MacBook Pro is the least of the design changes we're expecting here—it may look much different than current models, thanks to three major changes. First, the function row of keys (F1, F2, F3, and so on) is expected to be replaced with an OLED touch panel, which will change what an exact button does contextually within macOS. If you're in an email, for example, F1 might reply all; in a browser, it might refresh, and so on. In addition, the new MacBook Pro is expected to have a wider trackpad, making it better for doing design and creative work. Finally, the power button will be upgraded to feature a TouchID sensor, much like the iPhone and iPad lines, allowing users to log in to their Macs with just their fingerprint.
That OLED touch panel is probably the most interesting innovation Apple's got up its sleeve this year. Given the fact that the Mac-maker has been steadily working to remove moving parts from all of its devices—remember, Apple has already put trackpads in the MacBook Pro and Retina MacBook that use haptics to simulate a click, and rumor has it that the iPhone 7 will have a similarly "fake" home button. Is the OLED touch panel, then, a test run for a future keyboard that is nothing more than a large, multitouch OLED display with haptic feedback? That's probably a ways off, but if so, it could significantly change what we think of as a "laptop."
It's also believed that Apple will unveil an updated Apple Watch next Tuesday. But if you're waiting for the Apple Watch 2 to significantly upgrade the Apple Watch's current capabilities, think again. It's believed that the next Apple Watch will be almost identical in function and appearance to the current model. The next Apple Watch is thought to have a slightly faster processor, as well as an internal GPS radio for more accurate fitness tracking. Otherwise, if you hated the first Apple Watch, or didn't see the point in the first place, there may be little to recommend the Apple Watch 2. Heck, even die-hard Apple Watch fans might find themselves hard-pressed to upgrade. But at least there'll probably be new straps to choose from.
These aren't the only announcements Apple is expected to make, of course. With the last iMacs refreshed in October 2015, and the last MacBook Airs given an update in March 2015, it seems likely Cupertino will use the iPhone 7 event to give both computers a spec bump, probably to use faster Intel Skylake processors. (The Retina MacBook's last update was in April, so it probably won't see a speed bump.) As for iPads, no one expects any upgrades there until early next year, when it's believed Apple will unveil a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, to sell side-by-side with the 12.7-inch model currently on sale. You can also expect Apple to announce release dates for iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, but we already know all about those.
So let's summarize. What we're expecting from the next Apple event is: two new iPhone models that will look largely identical to the ones that preceded them, as well as lose one of their features; a slightly upgraded Apple Watch 2; and a totally new MacBook Pro. If that seems anticlimactic, well, it's probably not just you.
It's always possible, of course, that Apple has a surprise up its sleeve—but it's been years now since Apple has been able to surprise anyone with a major hardware or software announcement: It's just too big and conspicuous for that anymore. So if you want to skip live-streaming next Tuesday's iPhone 7 event and just read our recap later, chances are you won't be missing much.
Related Video: The history of Apple in under 3 minutes
But what about current design roles? How will they favor over the next 15 years? Will every company by 2030 have a chief design officer, or will they all go extinct? Should a generation of creatives who grew up worshipping Apple's Jonathan Ive put all their eggs in the industrial design basket?
We talked to a dozen design leaders and thinkers from companies such as Frog, Artefact, and Ideo to find out which design jobs could die out in the next 15 years, and which could grow. There's no empirical evidence behind these picks, so they shouldn't be taken too seriously. Still, they represent the informed opinions of people who get paid to think about the future.
UX Designers
User experience designers are among the most in-demand designers working today. So how could their jobs disappear? According to Teague designers Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, Matt McElvogue, "UX design" has become too broad and muddled. "The design community has played fast and loose with the title 'UX designer,'" they write in an email. "From job posting to job posting and year to year, it jumps between disparate responsibilities, tools, and disciplines. Presently it seems to have settled on the title representing democratized design skills that produce friendly GUIs." In the future, they predict that UX design will divide into more specialized fields. "The expanding domain of user experience and its myriad disciplines will push the title 'UX designer' to a breaking point, unbundling its responsibilities to the appropriate specialists," they say.
Visual Designers
Visual designers are the ones responsible for the way an app looks. UX designers, meanwhile, are the ones who concentrate on how it feels. A lot of times, designers do both, but going forward, jobs that require just visual design skills are going to die out. That's according to Charles Fulford, Executive Creative Director of Elephant, the San Francisco-based, Apple-centric stealth arm of the digital agency Huge. "Gone are the days of UX dumping a ton of wireframes on visual designers," he says, as well as "the days of visual designers being clueless about usability." What are needed instead are designers who can not only come up with the look of an idea, but make it real, with actual programming and prototyping skills.
Rob Girling, cofounder of the design consultancy Artefact, agrees. "In the next 10 years, all visual design jobs will start to be augmented by algorithmic visual approaches," he says. After all, design companies are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to create previously impossible algorithmic designs, as well as crunch UX data on millions of users. "An AI-powered tool can automatically provide a designer with 100 variations of a layout, based on some high-level template, or style definition . . . We see early versions of these algorithmic procedurally generated tools already in use by game designers." For example, the 17 billion planet universe in the recent blockbuster video game No Man's Sky was largely generated algorithmically.
The short version? If you're a visual designer, it's time to diversify.
Design Researchers "When ethnographic research was new in design, there were designers who specialized in research," explains Harry West, CEO of Frog. "The role of design researcher is now evolving to become a fundamental skill and practice for all types of designers. Today, for any design challenge, it is assumed that you first learn what the customer wants; every designer must know how to set up customer research and learn from the source." Consequently, no one needs a dedicated design researcher anymore. "The role is so fundamental that every designer should know how to do it," says West.
John Rousseau, executive director at Artefact, puts a finer point on it: New technologies like machine learning and virtual reality are killing design research. "Design research as we know it may cease to exist—at least in terms of the types of ethnographic field work we do today," he says. "Research—-and researchers—-will likely be marginalized by new forms of automated data and insight generation, compiled via remote sensing and delivered through technologies like virtual reality."
Traditional Industrial Designers
Most designers we asked predictably thought their own fields had rosy prospects. Not Markus Wierzoch, industrial design director at Artefact. He says that classically trained industrial designers who remain too attached to the "industrial" parts of their profession—in other words, overly focused on the sculptural look of a product—will become, in his words, "designosaurs."
"More than ever before, industrial design cannot exist in a vacuum," he writes. The issuer is that form no longer follows function and function only—software is also involved. That means industrial designers in the future will need to evolve to think about the total end-to-end user experience, a role Wierzoch calls the "post-industrial designer." (More on that below.)
Doreen Lorenzo, director of integrated design at UT Austin, also sees the role of the classically trained industrial designer dying off soon. "In the future, all designers will be hybrids," she says.
Chief Design Officers "This is a trend as of late: to have an executive-level design figurehead," says Sheryl Cababa, associate design director, Artefact. But that role might—and should—die, because it's redundant. "Good design is, fundamentally, interdisciplinary, which means that in a company that is design-oriented, all executives will be design practitioners, and the chief design officer position will vanish as quickly as it came."
CEO Tim Brown echoes the idea that design will be embedded at the executive level, although he doesn't necessarily think CDOs themselves are going to die out. "Business is moving from a long period where analytical skills were of extreme value in the search for efficiency, to one where creative and design skills will be essential to deal with complexity, volatility, and the requirements for constant innovation... CEOs will need to be designers in order to be successful."
Virtual Interaction Designers
Virtual and augmented reality is set to become a $150 billion industry by 2020, disrupting everything from health care to architecture. UT Austin's Doreen Lorenzo thinks that more user interface designers will start strapping themselves into Oculus Rifts and becoming VI designers. "As more and more products become completely virtual—from chatbots to 3D projections to immersive environments—we'll look to a new generation of virtual interaction designers to create experiences driven by conversation, gesture, and light," she writes.
Specialist Material Designers
Yvonne Lin of 4B Collective believes that in the near future, there will be a growing need for designers who can work in and across different types of materials. For example, she sees bamboo architects as being an up-and-coming design field, as the Western world embraces "the possibilities of a weight-bearing material that can grow three feet in 24 hours and can be bent, laminated, joined, and stripped," as Asia has.
She also says that designers who can sew will soon be in hot demand to create structural soft goods. What's a structural soft good? Think of the kind of things MIT's Neri Oxman designs, or wearables that are as much tech as textile: a blend of circuit boards and fabrics, like Google's Project Jacquard.
"Today, there is a skill and knowledge gap between the soft- and hard-good world. Very few people know how to work in both," she says. "The intelligent mixing of fabrics (for comfort) and plastics and metals (for structure and function) would have significant benefits for health care and sports products. As people live longer and as sports participation increases the demand for these more comfortable and higher performance products will increase." Maybe even tomorrow's Air McFlys.
Algorithmic/AI Design Specialists
Fifteen years down the road, few of the designers we spoke to were afraid that a robot or algorithm would take their jobs. Though "applied creativity is fundamentally hard to codify," as Artefact's Rob Girling says, artificial intelligence will create new design opportunities—so much so that Girling and other designers we spoke to think that AI and algorithms represent growing field.
"Human-centered design has expanded from the design of objects (industrial design) to the design of experiences (adding interaction design, visual design, and the design of spaces) and the next step will be the design of system behavior: the design of the algorithms that determine the behavior of automated or intelligent systems," argues Harry West at Frog.
For example, designing the algorithm that determines how an autonomous vehicle makes the right human-centered decisions in an unavoidable collision. "The challenge for the designers is to tie the coding of algorithms with the experiences they enable."
Post-Industrial Designers "As every object becomes connected—from your couch to your fitness bracelet, the hospital room to your wallet—we need to think about connected experiences," says Artefact's Markus Wierzoch. "[These] offer much broader value propositions, which means we need to change the [design] processes used to define these objects beyond their immediate form and function."
Enter the postindustrial designer. Postindustrial designers will need to think of the total end-to-end user experience to build "tangible experiences that connect the physical and digital worlds," Wierzoch says.
For example, the designer of the future, charged with designing an electrical toothbrush, will need to make sure their toothbrush can connect to an app, give users brushing stats, as well as plug into the future smart home. It's just not enough to design something that cleans your teeth well anymore. "Someone has to be responsible to stitch complex experiences together," Argodesign's Mark Rolston says.
Design Strategists
Design researchers may find fewer opportunities in the next 15 years, but Artefact's John Rousseau thinks design strategists will be indispensable. "The importance of design strategy will grow," he says. "Future design strategists will need the ability to understand and model increasingly complex systems"—for example, social media networks or supply chains—"and will design new products and services in a volatile environment characterized by continuous disruption and a high degree of uncertainty." In other words, a future defined by political, social, business, and tech disruption that can happen overnight. In such a future, Rousseau says, design strategists will be like ballerinas, dancing their companies in and out of trouble. "It will be more of a dance, and less of a march."
Organization Designers
The org chart of the future isn't going to be the same as the org chart of the past. That's why Ideo partner Bryan Walker thinks dedicated organization designers will be on hand, helping make companies more "adaptive, creative, and prolific." These designers, he says, "will help reimagine all aspects of an organization from its underlying structures, incentives, processes, and talent practices to its physical workplaces, digital collaboration tools and communications. "
Freelance Designers
Get used to working in your pajamas. According to Teague's Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, and Matt McElvogue, the future of design is freelance. "Creative AI and global creative marketplaces will give individual designers on-demand access to skill sets previously only capable within large teams," they write. "The result is a surge in the specialization, efficacy, and independence of the designer." In their vision, freelancers won't just toil away in solitude, they'll form a "network of targeted micro-consultancies" that compete with more traditional firms.
Just add grass, dirt, and sunlight, and Terra will take care of the rest.
There are few things more pleasant than relaxing on a grassy hill in the park on a summer day. Such seats, though, are rarely ergonomic. Terra can fix all that: it's a system that allows you to "grow" grass furniture in your backyard.
The Terra kit contains a lasercut cardboard frame which you assemble in your backyard, then bury in dirt and sprinkle with grass seeds. After a year of watering and sunlight, they'll become natural chair-and-sofa shaped hillocks in your backyard.
Designed by Italian design duo Studio Nucleo, Terra has something of a long design history. It actually dates back to 2000, when Studio Nucleo co-founders Andrea Sanna and Piergiorgio Robino put it on display at the Milane Salone Satellite. Until 2005, Sanna and Piergiorgio sold the Terra kits to anyone who wanted one, cutting them out laboriously by hand. Now that laser cutters are so cheap, though, they're bringing the Terra back.
But they aren't cheap. The studio is just successfully finishing its Kickstarter campaign, which offered a simple Terra grass armchair for preorder for around $279, while a three-seat Terra sofa cost $659. That's a pretty astonishing price for something which could probably be recreated with an old cardboard box and an x-acto knife as a Saturday afternoon project. Is an armchair out of grass really worth $279?
Maybe on a sunny spring day. But keep in mind, most of the time, that butt bucket is going to be wet, cold, and squishy with worms and centipedes. And as some commenters on Core77 have pointed out, this idea, poetic as it might be, has some other practical concerns, including the fact that it would have to be hand-trimmed by scissors, and would form a perpetual puddle in the seat since it has no way of draining properly.
So yeah. Maybe don't throw out your patio furniture just yet. But if you insist, you can find out more information about Terra here.
Reuters reports that Google has killed Project Ara, ambitious project to build fully modular smartphones with interchangeable components. According to the report, Project Ara—which Google was showing off as recently as May at its annual I/O conference—was killed as part of a larger effort to consolidate the company's many different hardware projects. Still, the writing, retrospect, was on the wall.
Ara emerged out of Google's Advanced Technology and Products group (ATAP) in October 2013, but its launch was delayed in late 2015 when it was discovered that the modular smartphones were breaking apart when dropped, pushing back the release date until 2016.
In May, after announcing that developer units would go on sale in autmn, the Project Ara team told me they were refocusing Project Ara from a fully upgradeable smartphone to a framework for fringe features. In other words, Google's "fully upgradeable" smartphone wouldn't allow users to upgrade to a faster CPU, add more memory, replace the screen, or add a faster cellular modem, as it once claimed. Instead, customers would be limited to adding extraneous bells-and-whistles to their smartphones, like e-ink displays, better speakers, larger batteries, and other lesser features which, frankly, third-party accessories can already add to smartphones without needing modularity.
Without being able to upgrade the core components, though, the promise of Project Ara—a forever smartphone that you upgrade piece-by-piece—falls apart. Meanwhile, other Android smartphones like the LG G5 and Moto Z have been released this year with modular capabilities. They weren't as ambitious as Project Ara, but the fact that these phones haven't really moved the needle in the smartphone market couldn't have made Google feel better about keeping Project Ara going.
It's disappointing, but unsurprising. Project Ara was born out of Phonebloks, a Lego-like concept for smartphones by Dutch designer Dave Hakkens back in September 2013. At the time, I laid out the many reasons why a modular smartphone didn't really make sense, including the fact that the components would be much more expensive, likely to break, and power-hungry than their integrated equivalents. I described it as a "designer's dream and an engineer's nightmare." Three years later, it looks like Google is finally forcing Project Ara to wake up from that nightmare and move on.
Gadi Amit, president and principal of New Deal Design, was involved with Project Ara from the start and helped design its grid-like endoskeleton. "I'm very sad the project is closed. The ATAP team that led the project at the start was amazing and visionary (Paul Eremenko and Regina Dugan), and in retrospect, the project did have an impact in making modularity and user choice come to the forefront of the mobile industry," Amit writes. (For example, in the aforementioned LG G5 and Moto Z phones.) Sadly, Amit thinks that the death of Ara will effectively kill truly modular smartphones, at least for the foreseeable future. "I think modularity at the level Ara [tried to achieve] is too complex for anyone but Google or Apple to develop... and therefore, probably dead for now."
I'm also sad to see Project Ara go. I never believed it would work, but I wanted to be proven wrong, especially after meeting with the talented ATAP team at Google I/O 2016. They got me excited about Project Ara's accessibility features: the possibility of a diabetic being able to monitor their blood sugar with their smartphone, or a blind person snapping a braille reader to the back, seemed a lot more useful to me than a bunch of bleeding-edge tech nerds upgrading their smartphone CPUs every few months. That seems to me the real loss in Project Ara's death: the possibility it it could make smartphones truly personal—and thus, more usable—for millions of people with chronic conditions and disabilities around the world. RIP Ara.
We have reached out to Google and several other people involved in Project Ara for comment. We will update this story when we hear back.
If your psychotherapist turns up with one of these, make an excuse and leave.
Most of us are familiar with Rorschach inkblots as a tool psychologists use to test patients' personality and emotional well-being, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. In his new book, Psychobook (Princeton Architectural Press), art historian and critic Mel Gooding examines some of the other designs that 20th-century shrinks used to get inside their patients' heads, and there are some real doozies in there. Here are four tests we're glad psychology has moved beyond.
Most psychology tests are, in their own way, based upon the idea of interpretation: namely, a doctor prompting a patient with ideas and objects, then interpreting what those responses mean. Few psychology tests, though, have ever taken it to such offensive extremes as the Szondi test. Invented by Hungarian psychiatrist Léopold Szondi in 1935, the test presented six sets of photographic portraits to patients, who were asked to classify these "psychopaths" into eight different categories: homosexual, sadist, epileptic, hysteric, catatonic, paranoid, depressive, and maniac. A patient's choice supposedly reveals the true nature of the patient's own personality, ranked upon Szondi's equally bizarre Drive system. "If your psychotherapist turns up with one of these, make an excuse and leave," jokes Gooding.
Image: British Psychological Society, History of Psychology Center
Want to know if your kid has the sensitivity and aesthetic eye to be an artist? This test, designed by Margaret McAdory in 1933, purported to do so, according to psychology! The test was simple: a subject was shown a collection of four objects—a vase, a spoon, etc.—then asked to identify the best design. Oh, you're going to pick that one, hmm? Are you sure? BZZZZT. Wrong! Forget your scholarship to RISD, kid, you're clearly not cut out for a career in the arts. Gooding says that what's particularly strange to him about the test is how good all of the designs are. "Some of them have a pop art or conceptual aesthetic," he says. "They're all quite interesting. But MacAdory's test [claims] there's only one right answer to any question of art, which we, as modern people, know simply isn't true."
A variation on the Rorschach test, the TAT (thematic apperception test) was created by American psychologist Henry A. Murray and psychoanalyst Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard during the 1930s. Subjects are encouraged to look at a series of pictures and describe the story they tell; the story is then analyzed. (Side note: the TAT was apparently inspired by a famous chapter in Moby Dick in which the entire crew of the Pequod interpret the symbols in a doubloon as an extension of themselves.) Critics call the TAT wildly unscientific, as the interpretations psychologists make cannot be proven or disproven, but Gooding points out another problem with them: The images used in the 1930s TATs are totally nightmarish. In one, an old crone leers over the shoulder of an androgynous young woman or man. In another, a man is seized violently in the dark. "They can be very sinister in their own way," Gooding notes. Today, many professionals still use TATs, although not necessarily with these designs: The only requirement is that the images be both provocative and ambiguous.
Image: British Psychological Society, History of Psychology Center
Created in the 1920s by Chicago child psychiatrist and criminologist William Healy, this test looks, at first, pretty benign. Children are supplied a scene of a bunch of people doing things, but with all objects removed. A child is then tasked to place tokens representing those objects where they are supposed to go. For example, a little girl feeding a saucer of milk to a cat, or two little boys kicking a football back and forth. So far, so good. But inevitably, some kid is going to think it's funny to make those kids kick a cat back and forth, instead of a football—which is just what the Pictorial Completion Test was designed to detect. Healy believed that his Pictorial Completion Tests could detect "defective or aberrational" tendencies in children that would lead to signs of juvenile delinquency and future criminal behavior.
Although some of these tests are obviously outdated or offensive to modern eyes, Gooding says that they, and others in Psychobook, all have merit, at least to historians. "Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, so I think it's fair to call the 20th century the Age of Psychology," he says. "All throughout the century, you just see a huge increase in people's fascination with what makes us all tick, resulting in this just fantastic accumulation of materials to test and to investigate." Reading Psychobook is like taking a whirlwind tour through the Age of Psychology, as seen through the visual designs that the headshrinkers left behind.
The new AirPods remove all the pain points that afflict wireless headphones, save one: the price.
At this week's Apple event, the most interesting new design wasn't the iPhone 7, or the Apple Watch Series 2. No, it was the AirPods, Apple's new wireless headphones.
In an event that was pretty boring from a design lover's perspective, the AirPods were refreshing—if only because they attempt to solve some of the biggest pain points about existing wireless headphones: the annoying Bluetooth pairing process which makes juggling a single set between multiple devices difficult, and the fiddly need to constantly keep them charged.
Say what you want about the old wired EarPods, but they're legitimately well-designed. An iconic profile, merged with great sound and a seamless, easy-to-mass-produce design, make the EarPods easily the best pack-in headphones in the world. So it makes sense that Apple would stick with its design for the wireless version; in fact, in appearance, the AirPods look like someone took a pair of EarPods and cauterized the cord. The tips boast a silver cap that dangles near the earlobe, and which we suspect is weighted to prevent the AirPods from popping out of your ear. Not only do the tips lend the AirPods a futuristic look—almost like an unused prop from Her—but they double as mic for phone calls and Siri requests (which can be made just by tapping the side of the AirPod).
It's the insides of the AirPods that really distinguish them from just another pair of wireless Bluetooth earbuds. They run on a proprietary band of Apple-sanctioned wireless that makes pairing with an iPhone or a Mac a snap. AirPods can even juggle multiple connections, switching on the fly to connect to the device you're actually using, not the one they were previously connected to. Pairing with a new iPhone, meanwhile, is as easy as opening the AirPods' Li-ion battery-powered smart case—which, incidentally, also charges the AirPods when they aren't in use. There's even some clever infrared technology built into the AirPods, so that if you try to play music on your iPhone and they're not in your ear, it automatically plays through the device speakers instead.
The trade-off for all this easy pairing? The AirPods won't work outside of your collection of Apple products, like Android smartphones, or PCs. This, of course, is by design: Apple's always trying to further lock customers into its own proprietary hardware ecosystem, which means routinely shutting out brand agnostics. But if you're willing to go all-in, Apple's new AirPods and wireless headphone technology will remove most of Bluetooth headphones' pain points.
Of course, you could argue that given the fact that the company removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, these were all pain points with existing wireless headphones Apple had to solve if they expected people to give up their corded cans. Still, in an otherwise ho-hum Apple event, it's notable that Apple managed to do what it set out to do: offer up a compelling vision of how the future of wireless headphones should actually look.
It only failed in one regard... the price. Because despite the fact that Apple's new AirPods look shockingly easy to lose, Apple wants a teeth-aching $159 a pair for them. If that price point is the future of wireless headphones, I'll stick with my timeless, pointedly-classic Koss Porta-Pros.
The Lincoln Plaza Housing Tower is "an open invitation to commit suicide," and winner of the 2016 Carbuncle Cup.
Since 2006, British architecture magazine Building Design has been handing out the Carbuncle Cup, an annual prize to "the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months." Over the years, some truly dreadful buildings have won the ignominious prize, including the Drake Circus Shopping Centre, a building that looks like a child's drawing of a building, and 20 Fenchurch Street, a building that resembles a gigantic walkie-talkie.
This year's winner of the Carbuncle Cup has just been announced on Dezeen, and as the name of the award might imply, it is indeed a bulging abscess on the skyline of the City of London. The Lincoln Plaza Housing Tower in east London by BUJ Architects has won the prize, with an insane construction with randomly distributed protruding balconies that Building Design calls "an open invitation to commit suicide."
When architects gets catty, they are the best writers on Earth, so Building Design's commentary on this building really speaks for itself. Describing it as a project which "beggars belief,"Building Design describes the "crude, jarring, and shambolic" construction as a "hideous mélange of materials, forms, and colours,""an assortment of haphazardly assembled façades . . . enwrap[ing] a grotesque Jenga game of rabid rectilinear blocks of no discernible form or profile . . ."
Lincoln Plaza is a putrid, pugilistic horror show that should never have been built. In its bilious cladding, chaotic form, adhesive balconies and frenzied facades, it exhibits the absolute worst in shambolic architectural design and cheap visual gimmickry.
Essentially, this building is the architectural embodiment of sea sickness, waves of nausea frozen in sheaths of glass and coloured aluminium that, when stared at for too long, summon queasiness, discomfort and, if you're really unlucky, a reappearance of lunch as inevitably as puddles after a rainstorm.
Other buildings shortlisted for the not-so-prestigious architectural prize include: Rolfe Judd's Southroin Square (described by Building Design as having a "car crash of a façade"); the Diamond at the University of Sheffield by Twelve Architects (a building which has an "unsettling similarity to a hydroelectric plant); RHWL Architects' One Smithfield, Stoke on Trent ("One saving grace is that its alleged role as a catalyst for local regeneration means that there are few buildings nearby forced to view it"), the Poole Methodist Church extension by Intelligent Design Centre ("the sheer scale of its deficiencies reverberate far and wide across the grim spectrum of planning failure and architectural blight"); and Make Architects' Broadgate, London ("a mute steel fortress" which received Carbuncle nominations "long before it was finished.")
The Go Wheelchair is meant to "look cool lined up at the club," says its creator, and is more practical and comfortable than regular chairs.
Unlike most wheelchairs, which look institutional and utilitarian, the Go is ultrastylish—a truly covetable accessory that's meant, says designer Benjamin Hubert, to "look cool lined up at the club." And it isn't just eye candy. Though wheelchairs are used by more than 2.2 million Americans each day, they tend to be one-size-fits-most affairs that ignore how different people's bodies can be, especially when disability is involved. The Go is custom-tailored to its owner's shape, in part via a full body scan and 3D printing. The wheel rims are lined with hundreds of tiny silicone knobs, which, when paired with specially designed gloves that come with the chair, help minimize rotator-cuff injuries by improving grip and reducing arm fatigue.
Friendly and authoritative, Sharp Sans is influenced by an era when Hillary herself was getting interested in politics.
The Hillary Clinton campaign might just have the most comprehensive brand identity in presidential history. In stark contrast to the clumsy, ham-fisted efforts of her design-challenged opposition, every aspect of Hillary Clinton's brand identity has been agonized over, from the Pentagram-designed arrow logo to the campaign's Pantsuit UI, all thanks to a world-class design stable that includes industry titans such as Michael Bierut, Jesse Reed, and Jennifer Kinon.
Lesser known, but no less important to the success of Hillary's visual identity? Lucas Sharp, a young, Parsons-trained type designer whose eponymous font, Sharp Sans, was chosen as the official typeface of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign. A friendly, authoritative geometric sans serif that can also wither when it's aimed mockingly at Trump, Sharp Sans is the glue that helps bind together Hillary's campaign and get her message to voters.
But how did Sharp Sans become to Hillary 2016 what Gotham was to Obama 2008? The answer has its surprising origins in the counterculture design world of the late 1960s.
The story of Sharp Sans starts almost 50 years ago, with Avant-Garde, a famously progressive counterculture magazine designed by the legendary Herb Lubalin. Published for just 14 issues between 1968 and 1971, Avant-Garde made a huge splash in New York's advertising circles, thanks to the power of the magazine's postmodern editorial designs, which included covers featuring still taboo imagery like nude pregnant women, or a parody of The Spirit Of '76 featuring a white woman and black man instead of the original white male subjects.
When Avant-Garde folded, the geometric sans serif lettering used for its logo and headlines was fleshed out into a more complete typeface, ITC Avant Garde, by Lubalin and type designer Ed Benguiat. (Stranger Things fans, note that the show's typographically beloved intro pairs ITC Avant Garde with Benguiat's own eponymous typeface.)
But it's hard to modify a logo design into a font, and ITC Avant Garde had problems, says Sharp. The original letters were all caps, making the lower-case versions clear afterthoughts. Additionally, Lubalin's original designs were meant to be goosed by hand, not auto-kerned. To Sharp's eyes, it made ITC Avant Garde always look a little wonky. So when he launched his new eponymous type design studio late last year, he did so with a font that aimed to pay tribute to ITC Avant Garde and other geometric sans serifs of the 1970s, while fixing those small issues.
At its core, the design of Sharp Sans is based upon the circle. When you look at Sharp Sans, you can see that every curve is circular, from the aperture of the "o" to the inner curve of the "s." It isn't a perfect circle mathematically—it's what's called an optically perfect circle, a "perfect" circle as most human eyes prefer it, very slightly wider than they are tall. From there, every letter of Sharp Sans only has a singly stroke width, and angles tend to be variations of 45 of 90 degrees. Sharp tells me that in addition to picking up influences from ITC Avant Garde, he was also inspired by Futura, Avenir, Gotham, and "Frutiger Frutiger Frutiger." After putting all those influences in a blender, Sharp Sans was meant to be "an amalgam of everything that's useful," and an "embodiment of the platonic neoliberal sans serif."
Metaphysical type aspirations, to be sure, but when Michael Bierut discovered Sharp Sans in early 2015, the Pentagram founder was impressed—impressed enough to float the font by Hillary Clinton's design director, Jennifer Kinon, as a choice for Hillary 2016's official typeface. Under Kinon, Sharp went back to the drawing board, further fleshing Sharp Sans out with slab, grotesque, and stencil variations. "Michael and Jennifer were really attached to the original Sharp Sans, but I was adamant that it needed to be more flexible," Sharp says. "In a presidential campaign, a typeface needs to look good anywhere, from email templates and impromptu fliers to posters and banners." The Hillary-approved version of Sharp Sans fulfills all those criteria. "Hopefully, this will be the last version, since I'm sick of drawing this thing," quips Sharp.
But why did the Hillary Clinton campaign specifically decide to go with Sharp Sans? According to Pentagram's Michael Bierut, who helped author the campaign's visual identity, the campaign early on decided to favor sans serif fonts rather than serif, and upper and lower case versus all capitals.
"The sans serifs were fresher—Secretary Clinton had used serif types in her previous presidential and senatorial campaigns—and the upper and lower case seemed more friendly and approachable," he says. "As we compared all the options available, Sharp Sans stood out. The simple geometric forms complimented the 'arrow H' logo we were developing, and we particularly liked the drawings of specific letterforms, like the one-story lowercase 'a' and the round dots over the 'i.' In its heavier weights it seemed bold yet conversational, exactly the balance we were looking for. "
Sharp, though, seems shy about a lot of those kind words. Instead, he chalks up his success to a far more accidental source. "I think I came around with the right design at the right time," he says. "At the end of the day, it's just what's in vogue right now." Look at another geometric sans serif font, Gotham, which Obama used in 2008, and which Sharp calls "probably the most overused font in the world" right now. It's popular, though, because it's friendly and authoritarian. "Sharp Sans is a fresh face on a similar idea, which is why it's a good match for Hillary," says Sharp.
And what font would be a good match for Hillary's opponent, Donald Trump? To that question, Sharp at first starts cackling. "Oh, that's a great question . . . something cheap, and like on sale for $0.99 at MyFonts," he says at first. But then Sharp thinks twice. "On second thought, I better not answer," he says apologetically. "I don't want to offend anyone by naming their font as the Trump font. This is a great business I'd like to stay a part of for a long time."
WaveNet is going to help fill in computer speech's uncanny valley.
It's hard to put your finger on why, but the voices our computers use to speak just sound wrong. Even with the best voice programming, like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, computers sound—well—robotic when they talk. But that could change soon. Neural networks are now tackling the problem of making computer speech sound more natural, filling sentences with nonverbal sounds like lip smacks, breath intakes, and irregular pauses.
DeepMind, an Alphabet-owned world leader in artificial intelligence research, recently published a blog post about WaveNet, a convolutional neural network (like DeepDream) that can reduce the performance gap between computer and human speech by about 50%, researchers say. In other words, in blind opinion tests on how good WaveNet's speech sounded compared to humans, it did significantly better than other text-to-speech methods. But how?
As the DeepMind team explains in their post, most computer voices, like Siri's, are made up of huge databases of recorded speech fragments, recorded from a single speaker and then recombined by a computer to form sentences. This gives decent results, but has drawbacks. The initial databases are expensive and time-consuming to construct, and can't be modified without recording a new database from scratch. That's why, incidentally, you only hear so many computer voices out there. Apple can't just program Siri to, say, speak with a sexy James Bond accent. The company would have to record hundreds of hours of someone who spoke with that accent first. This approach also contributes to computer speech's uncanny valley problem, creating mostly accurate computer voices that still feel somehow *wrong*, and therefore repulsive, to our human ears. Unlike a human, no matter how many times a computer says a word, it will always say it with the exact same pronunciation and cadence.
Here's where WaveNet comes in. By feeding Google's own voice database—the ones used in OK Google—into a neural network, DeepMind was able to train WaveNet to actually recreate the sounds it needs to make up a sentence, with millions of incredibly slight variations. If that confuses you, think of it this way: Whereas most computers speak by piecing together blocks of prerecorded sounds, DeepMind essentially remembers those sounds and says them out loud when it needs to use them. It's a key difference that makes WaveNet's text-to-speech samples sound more natural than even industry leaders, like Google's. Compared to the usual method, WaveNet's computers talk in a more flowing, regular cadence. Take this sample sentence: "The Blue Lagoon is a 1980 American romance film directed by Randall Kleiser." Compared to WaveNet, Google's default attempts to say this sentence make each individual syllable of this sentence sound as if there's an air gap between them. WaveNet, on the other hand, glides from phoneme to phoneme, like a human. Seriously, check it out for yourself.
Movies like Spike Jonze's Her or even 2001: A Space Odyssey present a future in which talking to a computer is as natural as talking to a human, but the truth is, despite our natural instinct to anthropomorphize our computers, most of us find it frustrating to interact with our UIs through speech. It's early days yet, but it's easy to see how approaches like WaveNet could make virtual assistants sound more natural—starting with Google's own. Given DeepMind and Google are both owned by Alphabet, don't be surprised if these improvements start rolling out to Google's text-to-speech functionality sooner rather than later.
